I didn’t have any intention of coming back to Tanzania and when I said goodbye to people, most of them told me I’d back. I laughed at them but it seems they knew more than me. The UK was a very different place to the last time I was there. The place is depressed, people are miserable and getting poorer and poorer. Shop shelves are emptying, there are not enough drivers and taxes are going up. There’s not much reason to be happy.
I had tried really hard to find a job but my age and my years out of the country are an obstacle to me finding something. Mostly you just don’t even get a reply to an application, even for those jobs for which you are a perfect fit.
Hence when I was asked by an NGO to come back to Tanzania to work on a agricultural skills development programme it was an easy decision. Morogoro is not a very exciting place to live. There is very little to do here and apart from the mountains and bird life there really is nothing to commend it.
People seem to travel through the place stopping only for a night before moving on to Dar or up-country or Dodoma. Nobody comes here for tourism. There are very few foreigners here and although of course I need local friends, they do not have the same interests as us foreigners. They don’t want to eat in restaurants and drink beer and whisky. They mostly stay at home with their family and go to bed early. So it’s hard to find local friends.
There is the added complication of not knowing the motivation for someone being your friend. You have to always be on the look-out for people who see you as a means to enrich themselves. Even professionals have befriended me and then asked for money to help with medical bills or other expense. There is no quicker way of destroying a friendship than to ask for money.
Morogoro is not the sort of place you want to spend the weekend so each Friday I go to Dar es Salaam and return on Monday. It’s a five hour slog but well worth it to get to some nice restaurants, cafes, shops and bring back good quality meat and dairy produce.
So never say never because you just don’t know what opportunities might come along.